Cheddar Man is the oldest skeleton found in Britain, and DNA analysis of his body has revealed that he had dark to black skin, coarse black hair and blue eyes.

Researchers from the University of College London (UCL) drilled a tiny hole into Cheddar Man’s head to extract bone powder for analysis. Since the DNA contained in the bone powder was in oddly good nick, the scientists were able to sequence Cheddar Man’s genome and draw conclusions about his appearance.

It was previously thought that Cheddar Man has light skin and brown eyes, but the new analysis showed that he was actually much darker.

What this means is that the genes for lighter skin appeared in Europe far later than originally thought.

“It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all,” Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, told The Guardian.

This is not the first time that science has proven that race is a social construct. Over the last two decades, scientists have studied genomes from different parts of the world and shown that there is no single genetic variant belonging to any particular group.